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Developers Voice Concerns About OpenGL 4.1 State Tracker

03-14-2011, 01:00 PM

Phoronix: Developers Voice Concerns About OpenGL 4.1 State Tracker

To no surprise, when mentioning an OpenGL 4.1 state tracker for Gallium3D being proposed as a Google Summer of Code project on Sunday morning, there has been a lot of interest in this work via the Phoronix Forums and several responses from key Mesa developers on the project's mailing list. The consensus among these core developers have been that this project is far too large to be completed over the course of a single summer and that it may not be wise essentially throwing out the Mesa code-base, as proposed by the Belgian student...

I -- and most other tech-oriented games devs I've spoken to -- are totally cool with stripping the compatibility profile. All that crap is garbage. Yes, it means rewriting some small portion of a larger app to port. So does moving from DirectX 9 to DirectX 10.

This is a good thing. The baggage is _confusing_ for developers. Almost nobody knows how the new versions of OpenGL actually work. I've been working on an OGL3 tutorial for a few months, and it's crazy how little documentation there is and how many people are still mixing in old OGL2 functions.

Plus the old stuff is slow. The matrix stack alone is a source of inefficiency and confusion.

Burn that stuff with fire.

The games industry devs -- and many other graphics professionals -- wante Khronos to totally break the API/ABI for OpenGL 3 anyway. We're still upset and disappointed that the CAD wienies got their way and retarded OpenGL's progress by years, and pretty much sealed the fate of Direct3D being the overwhelmingly superior API (which just unfortunately is not cross platform).

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The games industry devs -- and many other graphics professionals -- wante Khronos to totally break the API/ABI for OpenGL 3 anyway. We're still upset and disappointed that the CAD wienies got their way and retarded OpenGL's progress by years, and pretty much sealed the fate of Direct3D being the overwhelmingly superior API (which just unfortunately is not cross platform).

Let me disagree. This is the only thing that has kept OpenGL alive. Had DirectX been cross-platform from its ninth version forward, OpenGL would've been long dead.

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Let me disagree. This is the only thing that has kept OpenGL alive. Had DirectX been cross-platform from its ninth version forward, OpenGL would've been long dead.

Except that if dx9 was to be cross platform than no living soul on this planet would have scared about OpenGL anyway, which takes us back to: There is no good cross platform graphics lib whatsoever at this point in time, untill some student actualy has to stand up to fix the pile of crap, with all due massive respect for the Gallium devs that need to put up with fixing the crap that the industry has thrown at them and the entire GUI ecosystem as a result.

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I don't see a problem with the old API lingering around as optional baggage. Create a GL3 context without compatibility extension, and there you have your cleaned up API. What we really need to burn are all the tutorials that were written 10 years ago.

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I am trying to learn OpenGL from scratch and my last exposure was in the 1.5 version days. It is freaking hard to find a good tutorial that does not use (or even mention) the old immediate mode rendering.

Actualy the Khronos idea was to deprecate the compatibility stuff and leave it to the driver implementation to decide when to hack it away. I am all for doing it on an independent way like this one and see if there's an actual improvement. Smaller codebase, less unused stuff, more performance.

Look at MESA. Trying to implement all of the OGL legacy and new parts takes lot of time. Starting from scratch does not look that bad to me.

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He seems quite passionate and motivated to develop an OpenGL 4.1 Core state tracker for Gallium3D this summer, so that at least a subset of the specification will work

So he is going to develop OpenGL state tracker? ... from scratch? ... over summer? ... all alone? Is he some kind of superhero from outer space? How come I've never seen his BIG achievements before? Why it's taking so long time for team of skilled developers like: Alex Deucher, Dave Airlie, Marek Olšák, Brian Paul etc. to write OpenGL 3 state tracker when one inexperienced student from Belgium could do it alone and probably overnight ? Maybe he was on a trip to Holland recently and overdosed ?

To be serious: I think that when someone says BIG words, he should have THICK portfolio behind his back. I think that words of Denis aren't credible and are only nutrition for dreamers.

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So he is going to develop OpenGL state tracker? ... from scratch? ... over summer? ... all alone? Is he some kind of superhero from outer space? How come I've never seen his BIG achievements before? Why it's taking so long time for team of skilled developers like: Alex Deucher, Dave Airlie, Marek Olšák, Brian Paul etc. to write OpenGL 3 state tracker when one inexperienced student from Belgium could do it alone and probably overnight ? Maybe he was on a trip to Holland recently and overdosed ?

To be serious: I think that when someone says BIG words, he should have THICK portfolio behind his back. I think that words of Denis aren't credible and are only nutrition for dreamers.

I'm sure Linus was met with the same skepticism when he announced development of linux.

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I'm sure Linus was met with the same skepticism when he announced development of linux.

linus announcement circa 1991:

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).

I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and
I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.